A single mattress on the floor; “four dresses and two pairs of red shoes”; a young girl sleeping on a couch in a crowded apartment, clutching her small stash of money; careful lessons in applying eyeliner, but a purse that is a tangled mess of stubs of lipstick and unwrapped candies. In vivid, staccato images in this mix of prose and poetry, Chelene Knight evokes the many places she lives on the east side of Vancouver during the 1980s and 90s, carried along as her mother’s poverty and vulnerability moved their family of three from one basement apartment or shelter to another. There is the haze of cigarette smoke, the disquieting sounds of frequent male visitors. But there are also books, toted (when they can be packed hastily and transported readily) from one place to another, and Knight’s growing confidence in herself as a writer.

Knight manages a delicate balance of conveying the raw fragility of her girl-self, a “child forced to carry the weight of a low-functioning adult on her shoulders while trying to get an education,” with sympathetic understanding. “I tried to keep Mama safe,” she writes. The burden of ensuring someone else is still breathing is conveyed clearly, the young girl’s terror still palpable decades later. Knight reckons with the costs of how she grew up: “How could I become a mother when I have seen the way the unmoving light under a door could scrape a young girl from the inside out?” The support and expressions of love she longs for are not forthcoming, and yet from an unpromising ground of insecurity Knight creates a different life, and she generously credits those—her mother, the Black women writers, a few teachers—who helped.

So many of these images linger long past the experience of reading the book. I think of the young girl standing in line for hours to receive a Christmas gift but getting a knock-off of a barbie doll instead of the stuffed bear she wants, or the women's shelter where identical meals are served, notwithstanding the residents' food preferences. Knight conveys the ways in which people living in poverty are subjected to various external forms of control, including the condescension of philanthropy and public services.

This is a genre-blurring book, but I disagree with the reviews that suggest it feels fragmented. There is a powerful sense of the author’s voice linking the different forms, whether she is contemplating her past self, and wondering “How do I bring you back home,” or creating a poetic persona in “Miss Parker,” where the experience of being un-homed is extended to an account of an elderly woman, one of many “pleading on rooftops for rescue for days, / left counting bodies, family / lost . . . ” in what I took to be a representation of Hurricane Katrina.

In her letters addressed to the current occupants of the many houses where Knight lived in Vancouver, she conveys an acute sense of displacement, but also of attentive curiosity about sensory details. She offers her younger self a witness that she lacked at the time. That child’s pain is attended to, with care and compassion, and perhaps that is what makes the experience of reading this book so powerful: there is trauma and loss, but there is also a retrospective comfort. It was not achieved easily: “Drafts eight and nine came to me like lightning,” Knight writes, with the assistance of her editor, and in this acknowledgement—as in the author’s earlier mention of the three jobs she worked to put herself through school—there is a sense of the profound commitment she made in order to produce this important work. Sometimes the work of writing, alongside the work done to support the writing, disappears from view; here it is part of Knight’s commitment to not sinking into the sand, an image of resilience used to striking effect.

The short prose pieces in the section titled “Endnotes” offer explanations and context: for Knight’s sense of heritage and race, for the contemporary CanLit interest in (and sometimes fetishization of) diversity. Knight describes the book as a whole as “a quilt. Each square, each patch—doin’ work.” And because elsewhere she evokes the Black women writers she was not introduced to as she was growing up, including Morrison, I think here of Baby Suggs’s grey quilt with its two patches of orange, the way she hungers for more colour after the tragedy in Beloved.

Having been deprived of “Dionna Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Esi Edugyan, Cecily Nicholson, to name just a few” at school, she later enters into dialogue with their work, creating and acknowledging a literary tradition. She describes how, “reading Esi Edugyan’s Dreaming of Elsewhere, I was grabbed by the lapels and immediately transported into her story”; among very many other things, this is a book about how we envision possibilities for our own existence—even when survival is in doubt—through the words of others.

This brilliant book is one to buy and share, and it’s a book to teach, as part of the re-thinking of CanLit, which will require revising how genre is approached. When I taught CanLit survey courses I didn’t include contemporary life writing (and I was bemused when a colleague added Carole Pope’s autobiography to his course, although I’m sure it shook up students’ preconceptions about staidness). But it would now be difficult to teach Canadian Literature and not include substantial attention to the various forms of creative non-fiction that are flourishing.

And, too, this book is part of a reckoning with CanLit exclusions: the dominant whiteness and suffocating middle-class-ness. At last February's Room Festival in Vancouver, Knight and others created an extraordinary site for exploring how Canadian writing is changing, and I'm still reading the books I collected there. Dear Current Occupant should be taught alongside Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough, David Chariandy's Brother, and so many more authors: Carianne Leung and Suzette Mayr. Amber Dawn, Gwen Benaway and Billy-Ray Belcourt. How lucky are today's readers?